Anne-Thérèse de Lambert on Aging and Self-Esteem

This article studies Madame de Lambert’s early eighteenth-century views on aging, and especially the aging of women, by contextualizing them in a twofold way: (1) It understands them as a response to La Rochefoucauld’s scepticism concerning aging, women, and the aging of women. (2) It understands them as being closely connected to a long series of scattered remarks concerning esteem, self-esteem, and honnêteté in Lambert’s moral essays. While La Rochefoucauld describes aging as a decline of intellectual, emotional and physical powers and is suspicious of the mechanisms of esteem and self-esteem, Lambert develops a view of aging as offering the chance to become more independent from the judgment of others, especially the chance for women to become more independent from the judgment of men. As she argues, aging offers women the possibility to cultivate genuinely estimable intellectual and emotional qualities that attract the justified esteem essential for a stable friendship, as well as the opportunity to develop a form of self-esteem that is based on respect for one’s own capacities of judgment.